MathPlayer Known Issues

The information in this document applies to:

Issue

This TechNote describes the most important limitations of the current version of MathPlayer. See MathPlayer Installation Check to check if you have the latest version.

Reason

This document contains a list of known issues with MathPlayer. Please consult this list before contacting Design Science support at support@dessci.com.

Issues

These are the known issues and bugs in the latest version of MathPlayer. Wherever there's a case in the W3C MathML Test Suite that demonstrates the problem, we've included a link to that case. You can also browse the MathPlayer version of the test suite using its index.

• Erratic behavior when scaling in Print Preview for Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Print Preview of a page with MathPlayer math in it erratically drops out bits of the page content. Additionally if one scales the print preview, the display erratically flashes blocks of black. This bug has been reported to Microsoft for review.

• Distorted print output when equation object is zoomed. Zoomed math objects will be distorted in output to printer or to PDF file.

• MathPlayer's support for MathML characters is limited by the available fonts on your computer and MathPlayer's built-in knowledge of those fonts. We install a set of fonts with MathPlayer that covers the most commonly used math characters. When MathPlayer can't find a font for a character, it displays it as ?. MathPlayer knows about many math fonts, including the Mathematica set from Wolfram Research, Mathematical Pi from Adobe, Lucida from Y&Y, and others. If you install additional fonts and restart Internet Explorer, MathPlayer should display the additional characters.

• If Symbol bitmap fonts (symbole.fon or symbolf.fon) are installed, large brackets, braces, and parentheses break into pieces. This will not be fixed. We recommend that users remove these fonts or move them out of their Fonts folder. As every Windows system has a TrueType version of Symbol installed, there is no downside to removing the bitmap versions.

• Presentation MathML:

  • Plane 1 Unicode numerical character entities do not display (Presentation/TokenElements/mi/miequivalents11.html).
  • Table and column widths that are specified as a percentage of the available page space are not implemented (Presentation/TablesAndMatrices/mtable/mtableAwidth3.html).

• Content MathML:
  • Floor and ceiling brackets do not display with only DSI fonts installed (Content/ArithmeticAlgebraLogic/floor/rec-floor1.html and  Content/ArithmeticAlgebraLogic/ceiling/rec-ceiling1.html). These characters are available in the Mathematica fonts, which are installed with their free MathReader product and in the Lucida fonts, different versions of which are available from Adobe and Y & Y.
  • A wide MathML expression inside an HTML table doesn't extend the table (Content/ElementaryFunctions/trigonometry_8.html). This is due to limitations in Internet Explorer.

In addition to the issues noted here, we have documented several other MathPlayer Problems Due To Internet Explorer Bugs & Limitations that we hope will be addressed by Microsoft in later versions.

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